maximilian.spring@gmail.com writes:>Trying to resurrect this old code base [2], I run into the problem
that the original BEG binary which I still have is in an old a.out
format, and I have been unsuccessful so far to get it to run on a
modern Linux.

In my experience, to run an a.out binary, you need the corresponding
shared libraries from that time (libc4 etc.). One way to get that may
be to install an old Linux distribution in a virtual machine (chroot
is not good enough in my experience), and run your binary there.

I just tried out a few old binaries I have. All ZMAGIC binaries I
tried crashed right away (not a single system call between execve and
the SIGSEGV), while the QMAGIC binaries have a better chance of
working. Some seem to work fine, others crash, but execute some
system calls before crashing; I have libc4 etc. among the libraries,
otherwise only statically linked binaries would work.